The only good bug is a dead bug - would you like to know more?
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Thought it was over with the Twins? Thought it would end that easily? Oh, HELL no! Arthas had one more little surprise in store for TDC after we vanquished the Twins. You'd think building code in Icecrown would require knowing whether or not your nice new Coliseum was built on top of old Nerubian ruins, wouldn't you?
After being dropped into the bowels of the earth, we came face to face with the last boss in ToC; Anub'Arak was back from the dead, and badder than ever. It was up to TDC to fumigate this bug once and for all.
While not overly difficult, this fight does take significant coordination. We found that three tanks (one on Anub, two on the Burrower adds) was most effective for us. Ranged DPS focused on the first set of burrower adds, then switched fire to Anub until he burrowed, starting phase two. Once P2 started, we focus fired on the remaining Burrowers, then gathered the smaller bugs together as much as possible and dps'd them down, all the while avoiding Anub's spikes (which is a great lesson in kiting for classes that don't do it often!). After a couple of iterations of P1 and P2, Anub was at 30% and we entered P3. This is essentially a tank and spank/dps race before enrage with a twist; healers must be careful to keep the raid at about 50%, as Anub has a leeching AoE spell which heals him based on the percentage of HP left on his targets. Thus, if the raid is at a lower HP total, he doesn't heal as much. Getting past the mindset of topping everyone off was a challenge, but once we managed that Anub was history. Johnny Rico would have been proud!
ToC is now clear. We've enjoyed the instance, even if we're somewhat disappointed at the simple raid design. We'll be moving on to hard modes now, and looking forward to Icecrown, which will hopefully bring back the epic feeling of end game raiding. Great job folks!